TOA estimation for IR-UWB systems with different transceiver types

In this paper, performances of stored-reference, transmitted-reference (TR), and energy-detection (ED)-based time-of-arrival estimation techniques are analyzed for impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) systems at sub-Nyquist sampling rates. First, an additive white Gaussian noise channel is considered to emphasize certain fundamental issues related to these different transceivers. In particular, energy collection characteristics and decision statistics are presented. Probability of accurate peak detection is analyzed for each transceiver, and receiver operating characteristics for the leading edge are derived. Effects of number of pulses per symbol and number of averaging symbols are investigated in detail. Then, realistic multipath channels are addressed, and various maximum-likelihood estimation approaches are investigated. A new estimator that jointly exploits the noise statistics and power delay profile of the channel is proposed, and a Bayesian estimator that (ideally) gives a lower bound is analyzed. Simulation results show that while ED and TR have better energy collection capabilities at low-rate sampling, they suffer from distributing the energy over time.